{"id":857205,"url":"https://alion.io/job/weareplanet-ai-engineering-lead","title":"Director of Data Engineering & Platform","company":{"id":711629,"name":"Planet","domain":"weareplanet.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/weareplanet","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":10,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.6,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":40,"computed_at":"2026-10-02T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Porto, Portugal"],"countries":["PT"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":54000,"max_usd":130000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":558},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon Aurora","optional":false},{"name":"Anomaly Detection","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-02T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-28","last_verified_at":"2026-10-02T08:20:30Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":31,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":1,"flags":[],"days_open":30},"description":"About Planet\nPlanet is a global provider of integrated technology and payments solutions for retail and hospitality customers.\nWe create great experiences for the millions of people who use our payments, software, and tax-free solutions every minute of every day.\nPlanet empowers its customers to deliver great customer experiences by combining payments and software in ways that drive greater loyalty, increase revenue and save time.\nFounded over 35 years ago and with our headquarters in London, today we have more than 2,500 employees located across six continents serving our customers in more than 120 markets.\nRole Overview\nWe are seeking a hands-on, strategically minded, and execution-focused Director of Data Platform & Migration Engineering to lead our Hospitality data engineering function and support one of the company's most important strategic initiatives: the bulk migration of customers from On-Prem Property Management Systems (PMS) to our Cloud PMS platform.\nThis role will own the strategy and execution across data migrations, database architecture and health, performance engineering, and reporting data enablement. You will lead a team of 3-5 data engineers responsible for building scalable migration capabilities, strengthening our data platforms, and creating reliable foundations for reporting and downstream data solutions.\nThe successful candidate will bring broad, practical AWS experience beyond managed database services. They should be comfortable operating within a cloud-native ecosystem and partnering on architecture, security, networking, observability, reliability, automation, and cost-aware design. They will work closely with application engineering, Product, QA, DevOps, Architecture, and Operations because many database and migration improvements require coordinated changes across the wider platform.\nThis is an equal part strategic and hands-on leadership role for someone who enjoys solving complex data problems, improving operational efficiency, and applying AI where it produces measurable value in migrations, reporting, or data engineering.\nWhat you will do\nOwn the strategy and roadmap for Hospitality data platforms, ensuring scalable, secure, resilient, maintainable, and cost-effective solutions within the broader AWS environment.\nLead the strategy and execution for bulk migrations from On-Prem PMS solutions to Cloud PMS, including planning, tooling, automation, orchestration, transformation, validation, reconciliation, rollback, and operational readiness.\nOwn the data engineering strategy for reporting and define governed, scalable ways to provide reliable data to solution partners for reports, analytics, and other data solutions.\nOwn the architecture, health, performance, scalability, resilience, and lifecycle of databases supporting Hospitality products, primarily Cloud PMS.\nSet database engineering standards for data modelling, schema design, indexing, query patterns, change management, capacity planning, backup and recovery, and production readiness.\nLead performance tuning and platform enhancements across Amazon Aurora MySQL on Amazon RDS, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and related technologies.\nPartner with application engineering teams to deliver application-level changes that improve database efficiency, data quality, reliability, and scalability.\nEstablish AWS platform guardrails, observability, operational metrics, automation, disaster-recovery practices, and service ownership for data-intensive systems.\nApply AI in practical, responsible ways to reduce manual effort and improve quality across migrations, reporting, and data engineering, including mapping, transformation, anomaly detection, reconciliation, risk identification, and documentation.\nEnsure AI initiatives move beyond experimentation by defining measurable outcomes, validation, security controls, human oversight, and clear operational ownership.\nLead, coach, and grow data engineering team, building a culture of ownership, technical excellence, learning, pragmatic decision-making, and continuous improvement.\nTranslate ambiguous business needs into a prioritized roadmap and executable plans, collaborating closely with Product, Engineering, Architecture, QA, DevOps, Security, Operations, and partner-facing teams across distributed locations.\nWho you are\n10+ years of experience across data engineering, cloud platforms, software engineering, or related disciplines, including meaningful technical leadership responsibility.\nProven experience leading and developing engineering teams, ideally in a distributed and multicultural environment.\nBroad, hands-on AWS experience and sound understanding of cloud architecture, security, networking, observability, reliability, automation, and cost management.\nDeep expertise in relational database architecture and engineering, including MySQL and PostgreSQL, with practical knowledge of schema design, query optimization, indexing, capacity planning, and performance tuning.\nExperience designing and executing complex, high-volume data migrations with robust validation, reconciliation, automation, and operational controls.\nExperience operating production data platforms and establishing monitoring, incident prevention, recovery, and service-health practices.\nDemonstrated ability to partner with application engineering teams and influence application design to improve data quality, performance, and scalability.\nExperience defining data-delivery approaches for reporting, analytics, integrations, customers, or external solution partners.\nPractical experience applying AI to a real data engineering, data migration, reporting, or operational use case, with the ability to explain the problem, approach, controls, and measurable outcome.\nStrong communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to translate technical complexity into business outcomes, decisions, and executable plans.\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience with Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon RDS in highly available and performance-sensitive production environments.\nExperience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and mixed relational and NoSQL estates.\nHands-on knowledge of ProxySQL or similar database proxy, connection-pooling, and traffic-management technologies.\nExperience building cloud-native data platforms, migration factories, reporting ecosystems, or partner-facing data products on AWS.\nExperience using infrastructure as code, CI/CD, automation, and modern observability practices in AWS environments.\nKnowledge of data governance, privacy, security, compliance, and controlled third-party data access.\nExperience in hospitality, SaaS, fintech, retail, or another transaction-intensive and operationally critical domain.\nFamiliarity with Property Management Systems or the challenges of migrating legacy, customer-specific operational data is a strong plus.\nWhy Planet:\nPlanet is an equal opportunity employer where diversity is valued, and all employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business need.\nCome and grow your career in the most exciting, fast paced technology market, with a business that delivers feel-good connected commerce.\nWe would love to hear from you - Apply now.\nAt Planet, we embrace a hybrid work model, with three days a week in the office.\nReasonable accommodations may be made in order to allow for an individual to perform the essential functions of this role successfully.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7405,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Hybrid work"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Portugal","iso":"PT","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Payment Processing & Gateways","Travel Technology","Currency Exchange & FX Payments"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-13T07:22:30Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-09-17T00:40:05Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-09-28T21:24:05Z"}],"liveness":{"score":41,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.551,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":30,"expected_fill_days":40,"reasons":["conf:10","stale_co","velocity","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-02T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/weareplanet-ai-engineering-lead","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/weareplanet-ai-engineering-lead.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-03T00:43:41Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":411,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4589,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-04T00:00:00Z"}}}